A new research paper from Kaiming He's lab — notable for having an all-undergraduate team — demonstrates that high-quality text-to-image generation can be achieved with just 258 million parameters. This challenges the prevailing assumption that competitive image synthesis requires multi-billion-parameter models. The work signals a push toward leaner, more accessible generative vision architectures.
A student from India shared their first paper on r/LocalLLaMA, proposing Silia, a Transformer architecture for extremely small models. The idea is to merge attention-style dynamic mixing with SwiGLU-like nonlinear transformation, aiming to save parameters in models under roughly 10M parameters. The author frames the work as an early, small-scale exploration, limited by old hardware and restricted access to larger compute.